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Talk:Zerg history
Updating for HotS I've finally got a start on revamping the zerg history article (see User:Meco/dev3.) The sections up to HotS are "complete" (i.e. need to be double- and triple-checked for everything that can go wrong, especially where bits from HotS have been integrated). So have at it when you get the chance. - Meco (talk, ) 20:35, March 16, 2013 (UTC) More or less "done". Just need to finish adding the references for when the broods rejoin. - Meco (talk, ) 21:17, March 20, 2013 (UTC) Recent rewrite I am not particularly satisfied with the recent rewrite. Header names. These should directly reference the historical period the proceeding section describes. Out of universe campaign names are undescriptive for this purpose. The SC1 manual headers are also pretty bad. Another purpose for using something like "Second Great War" was for a (prospective) rewrite of the other race history articles. Consistently named headers for major events would make it much easier for readers to cross-reference. Too many tactical details. Like the big war articles, the race history should be a strategic overview of event, deferring to "tactical" articles for the nitty gritty details. This helps keep size down, and goes some way into future-proofing the article against changes Blizzard might make in the future. The new rewrite dwells too much on tactical events in individual battles. The "Heart of the Swarm" section stands out in particular. What we want is a summary of the result, not every action leading to it; leave those to "battle" and "war" articles and the like. Important details missing. The new rewrite is either missing some important context, or that context is not being presented in a obvious manner. Things which I noticed are now missing: #Motivations of the xel'naga: the life-cycle, mentioning the protoss experience when explaining the creation of the Overmind, even that nebulous but defining term "purity of essence" is missing #Amon's motivations #The tie between Duran and Amon, and Narud and Amon (only because Amon is such a big part of the background now) #The destruction of the cerebrates (a major change to the Swarm) #Swarm/Kerrigan's motivations leading up to for the Second Great War Personally, I think explaining why Kerrigan was significant to the Overmind should be done in the same paragraph, but at least that's sort of there right now. --- I don't know what to do with this article now. The problem of having too much tactical detail would require a rewrite to fix; we may as well just revert to the first post-HotS rewrite and go from there. (The other problems are trivial fixes.) There are things in the first major section concerning the zerg time on Zerus which I like; I missed/overthought some stuff while trying to synthesize something out of HotS and SC1. But those things are more easily ported to the previous rewrite. - Meco (talk, ) 09:47, October 13, 2013 (UTC) :I'm taking a look at it. I agree that a lot of important details are missing, but most of the missions (even in Heart of the Swarm) are described in two sentences or less. I trimmed a little from the HotS missions. The terran history section, though, has a lot more unneeded detail. :I'm not sure what to say about section headings; I took a look at versions from a few months ago and the titles were worse. PSH aka Kimera 757 (talk) ) 15:30, October 13, 2013 (UTC) There are a lot of missions which have an entire paragraph devoted to them; this is a sure sign of overloading on the tactical details. At this level, we should be attempting to convey the general directions of campaigns, rather than making a point-form list of missions (and in-mission events). The article should avoid getting bogged down in detail. Instead it should aim to convey the general direction of events. This is what I mean by too many tactical details. There's a lot of stuff here that isn't necessary to understand the general direction of events. For example, dwelling on the specifics of the evacuation of Mar Sara isn't particularly useful in understanding zerg participation during the Ep. I. Or things like how Kerrigan was escorted by 2 Hunter Killers on the Amerigo. Or the particulars of how Duran destroyed 4 hive clusters and wasn't allowed to destroy the psi disruptor. Or the details of how Kerrigan and Duran kidnapped Razsagal. Lots of little things like that, and some of which may be straying too close to taking gameplay literally in some cases. The HotS section is still far too large to this end. Again, lots of tactical details. For example, it's enough to know that the Swarm reclaimed Char and was reunited with Zagara. There's no need to dwell on the details of how this was done, unless it has some significant impact on later events. I don't think it's strategically significant to know about the Gorgons in the Bone Trench; even Warfield's death doesn't seem to have greater repercussions as far as the narrative goes. Practically all the HotS missions are described with unnecessary detail. In the current version, it takes an entire section for the events on each world to be summarized. In the previous version, it was about a paragraph each. Other sections (like the SC1 episodes) are also similarly inflated in the current version compared to the previous version. Which is why I think the previous version is far superior. The previous version actually summarizes by groups of events, instead of by individual events. It also tries to tie things into the "bigger picture"; the current version is too bogged down in tactical details to do that. Furthermore, the previous version is somewhat better at incorporating information from beyond the games; for example, we know that the executor in EpIII is Artanis, but the current version insists on using the awkward "the new Executor"/"the Executor" instead. As for section headers, and sections in general, they should describe and be organized by historical phases (which may or may not correspond to campaigns/episodes). This means general names for sections, or historical terms (like "Great War", "Second Great War".) Campaign names are not so good; they don't mean anything to people who are not familiar with SC1. The same goes for the SC1 manual headers, which we should probably avoid anyway given the importance of new info from SC2. So I really think we should revert, and mess around with the previous version. It was much closer to what the article should seek to achieve. - Meco (talk, ) 18:36, October 13, 2013 (UTC) :Could you link me to the "previous version"? I mentioned above that I had looked at the "old version", but I'm wondering if the changes you are referring to go further back? PSH aka Kimera 757 (talk) ) 12:29, October 14, 2013 (UTC) http://starcraft.wikia.com/wiki/Zerg_history?oldid=193065 Probably the time period you were looking at. - Meco (talk, ) 23:42, October 14, 2013 (UTC)